I have my 'webmaster' account email for my site come into my outlook express.  I understand that all mail will get directed to the webmaster account, if a certain account doesnt exist.  (huh?)

Ok, for example, the site is dopoyume.com .  If someone sends an email to michaeljackson@dopoyume.com because there is no michealjackson@dopoyume.com account, the mail will go into my webmaster account, right?  

Well... just today, I started to receive odd emails, all to different people: judy@dopoyume.com, jack@dopoyume.com, etc.  I opened the first one to see what it was, (the site is for a band, it could've been business related with someone just getting a band members name wrong).  It was an attachment, a zip file, so I <gasp> unzipped it, and suddenly my norton's antivirus started to go crazy.  Said a worm was attached.  kmvbp.pif I believe it was.  I quarantined it, did a virus scan and everything was clear.  But now, I keep getting these emails, I'm actually getting like 10 an hour!!    Again, they're all to different non existant people at dopoyume.com and all coming from different email addresses:

claudia@golf-gear-review.com
joe@sobobassprings.com
jim@wired.com
serg@golf-gear-review.com
adam@thelodgeatpinecove.com  , etc. etc. etc.

And each one has an attachment.  I haven't opened any since the first one though.

Is there anything I can do about this?  (Sorry so longwinded and confusing!)  Any help will be greatly appreciated.  

There are several mass email worms going on right now.

I've struggled with this issue for some time and have come to the conclusion that it's better NOT to have a default mailbox.

I once reasoned that I wanted to get the mail even if the sender misspelled the address. What happened was that I was spending my time fixing their mistakes, or getting unwanted email worms.

What's better is simply to bounce misaddressed emails. The sender then gets automatic notification that they made a mistake, and can fix it for the future.

To disable the default email address, go to control panel, click Email and select "Default Address" from the Main Manager Menu.

A-ha!! Just in case anyone else comes across this, I found out the problem (thanks to Nortons).

Seems to be an email worm as suspected.  

It's called: W32.Novarg.A@mm
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.novarg.a@mm.html
 

..and the Trend alert is there (I LOVE those Trend alerts heheh)

Catching Novarg.A requires the 1/26/2004 NAV definitions.

While blocking an IP address can help in extreme situations, with a mass email virus like this, it's probably not possible to find and block all the senders, and there is a risk of blocking legitimate mail. I'm getting them from an IP address different from the ones Martijn listed.

kwdavids,

Per your tip about setting up the default address to :fail: in CPanel, I decided to do that for all my accounts.  Thanks for the good idea.  I have never received an important message to a nonexisting account, and I think my reasoning for having the catchall were not really valid since a bounce back to the sender does let them know the address is either misspelled or invalid.

Thanks again

Hi RonR,

To set it to :fail: instead of blackhole lets the sender get a bounce back, so if it is a friend or acquaintance, they will know they are entering the wrong address/misspelling it.  That is the reason you might want to bounce it back to them.  Blackhole simply sends it to nowhere basically, and the person (and you) will never know the address was invalid.  With spam/virus emails, it doesn't matter what happens to them to get them out of your inbox, so blackhole would be fine, but I think fail is preferable in the instances I noted above if you want to catch legitimate correspondence to you being misspelled.

I hope this helps.

i prefer allowing *anything*@robkamphausen.com to come in, just because it helps me sort things.  like, i get my cable bill at cable@robkamphausen.com, phone bill at phone@robkamphausen.com (etc, etc).  i have lots of emails like that.

however, even if i shut off that ability, i'm getting dozens (every hour!) of spam emails.  even before this recent worm, i get roughly 40-50 per day.  now, since last checking my mail at 1 am last night, by 8 am, i had 82 spam emails.  

is there any recomended approach to removing all of this spam?

i have outlook express 6 (on an XP system).  i've set up many filters, by message and subject content, but they're either being "ignored," or the spams just find ways around it.